In the past year I've reviewed four lightweight Linuxes for OS News: VectorLinux, Puppy Linux, Lubuntu, and Damn Small Linux. This article compares the four distributions. I invite your comments in response: what are your own experiences with these and competing lightweight distros?

I once tested two of these lightweight distros for an old Pentium II laptop with 128 MB of RAM. I found them to be inconvenient and also somewhat outdated, starting with the distro's organization, but also in terms of what software is available.

I then tried Archlinux, because I also use it as my main system. I found it to be a perfect fit for the old laptop. The system was quite responsive and I could even watch videos on Youtube with epiphany+Flash.

So my experience is that it is not worth it to watch out for especially slim distros like DSL and puppy, if you can just take a slim-by-design major distro like Archlinux.